That’s two. And this is a big one, as discussed on today’s BradCast with someone who helped make it happen. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]
Former Trump attorney Sidney Powell pleaded guilty in Fulton County, Georgia today. She was the second of 19 co-defendants to do so in District Attorney Fani Willis‘ sprawling racketeering indictment [PDF] against Donald Trump and his alleged co-conspirators who tried, but failed, to steal the 2020 Presidential election in the Peach State.
Powell is, perhaps, most notorious for her so-called “Kraken” lawsuits filed after 2020, which she promised would expose evidence of massive Democratic fraud in several states. Her suits includes no such evidence and were all quickly dismissed. Her claims, for example, that dead Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez was somehow involved in stealing the election with voting machines — in which Powell bastardized and misused some of my own accurate exclusive reporting on Dominion Voting Systems circa 2010 — all turned out to be false.
But, as our guest today helped reveal earlier this year, Powell also organized and paid for a scheme to breach proprietary statewide voting system software in Coffee County, unlawfully make copies of it and distribute it across the Internet to sources still unknown. She was indicted by Willis on 7 felony counts related to that plot and, today, pleaded guilty to 6 misdemeanor charges that would keep her out of jail and on probation for 6 years, with the requirement that she cooperate fully with prosecutors and testify truthfully against her 17 remaining co-defendants still facing felony charges. Scott Hall, an Atlanta bail bondsman who initially confessed to the plot in Coffee County during a recorded phone call to frequent BradCast guest Marilyn Marks, as first aired on this program, pleaded guilty earlier this month and is also cooperating with prosecutors as part of his plea deal.
We’re joined today for both a bit of a victory lap and a very serious warning by SUSAN GREENHALGH, longtime election integrity expert and Senior Advisor on Election Security at the non-partisan Free Speech for People. With Marks, whose Coalition for Good Governance has a long-running lawsuit against GA Sec. of State Brad Raffensperger, seeking to replace the state’s touchscreen voting machines with hand-marked paper ballots, Greenhalgh helped reveal that the plot to breach the voting systems in GA was actually part of a broader, multi-state conspiracy hatched during an infamous December 18, 2020 meeting with Trump in the Oval Office. In addition to Powell, co-defendant Rudy Giuliani, disgraced former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn and others on Team MAGA were there that night, hoping that Trump would issue an Executive Order for the military to seize the nation’s voting machines. Instead, they settled on the Coffee County scheme and others like it in several other states.
“We know that [Powell’s] been involved in voting system software breaches in other states, like in Michigan,” Greenhalgh explains today. “But Sidney hasn’t been charged there. It’s important to keep in mind that this was a networked, coordinated, multi-pronged plan to get access to voting systems in multiple states that she was a part of, and she really shouldn’t escape responsibility for her role in those alleged criminal activities in other states.”
Greenhalgh recently co-wrote a piece at Slate, calling on the U.S. Justice Department to launch a probe into the multi-state scheme which, she explains today, still poses a very serious threat to the 2024 elections. “Suppose there was a plutonium laboratory that had a robbery, and your local police prosecuted the thieves and the people that let them in. You wouldn’t expect them to stop there. You’d expect the feds to go out and find out who got the plutonium and what was the plan to do with it. That’s the kind of investigation that we need right now.”
For today, at least, the guilty plea by Powell was good news. Marks called it “eminently important…for raising public awareness of the seriousness of the offense that puts Georgia’s 2024 elections at risk because Powell’s team released Georgia’s software into the wild.”
As we’ve discussed with Marks on the program many times, however, Raffensperger has taken no action and has arguably helped cover up the Coffee County breach from the jump. “While Georgia’s Secretary of State has turned a blind eye and declined to either investigate or mitigate this massive security failure,” Marks said in a statement today, “at least DA Willis is holding some of the ring leaders accountable in ways that will certainly expose other actors’ wrongdoing in this unlawful attempt to subvert the 2020 election.”
For her part, Greenhalgh says today that, though she “was surprised at how lenient the deal is”, she is hoping that Powell’s guilty plea is “really going to bring the goods” on the multi-state plot and, of course, the involvement of higher-ups in the food chain like Trump and Giuliani.
Greenhalgh encourages listeners to contact their members of Congress to insist they take action on the ongoing threats posed to our voting systems by the breaches in Coffee County and elsewhere before 2024.
Given the mind-blowing and ongoing dysfunction in the GOP-run U.S. House right now, however, amid the Republican Party’s continuing inability to choose a Speaker — as we also discuss on today’s show — it’s unlikely that there will be any kind of hearings or anything else there for quite some time.
Finally today, Desi Doyen joins us for our latest Green News Report, with bad news for snow crab fans; a decades-long scheme by the natural gas industry to cover-up health concerns about gas stoves; and some potentially encouraging news regarding both solar energy and U.S. climate goals…
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